1. Field
The present disclosure relates to queue scheduling in communication networks. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to a method and system for enhancing throughput by increasing the dequeue rate.
2. Related Art
The proliferation of the Internet and e-commerce continues to fuel evolutions in the telecom and network industries. Convergence in the underlying network architecture often takes place at a pace faster than the lifespan of most network equipment. For example, a large enterprise network today may contain Internet Protocol (IP) networks, storage area networks (SANs), Ethernet-based access networks, and leased lines and switches from telephone service providers. How to manage and fully utilize the equipment capacity in a heterogeneous environment remains an ongoing challenge.
To maximize returns on capital expenditures, many network architects prefer re-using existing equipment to switch data packets of different formats and aggregating low-speed switch ports to provision high-speed logical links. To achieve such a goal, I/O consolidation is needed. I/O consolidation is the ability to carry different types of traffic, having different characteristics and handling requirements, over the same physical media.
In storage networking, Fibre Channel (FC) is the most widely used protocol, and is an essential component in I/O consolidation solutions for data centers. Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) allows FC traffic to be transported over an Ethernet network. Hence, an Ethernet network can be used in a data center for consolidating flows from FC and Internet Protocol (IP), as well as other types of traffic. As a result, different types of traffic can share a single, integrated infrastructure, thereby reducing network complexities in the data center.
In an FCoE switch, a queue manager manages a number of Ethernet queues as well as FC queues, and a scheduler is responsible for scheduling frames from all the queues for transmission. In order to increase the network throughput, it is important for switch to have a fast dequeue rate. However, the dequeue rate is often limited by the roundtrip communication time between the scheduler and the queue manager.